Return to main Project News Page

Facts and Figures on the NAACP National Voter Fund and Americans for Equality
Background

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is the nation's largest civil rights organization. The NAACP's principal objective is to ensure the political, educational, social and economic equality of minority group citizens of United States and eliminate race prejudice. The NAACP is now a network of more than 2,200 affiliates covering all 50 states including the District of Columbia. Headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland, total membership exceeds 500,000.

In July, the NAACP initiated a separate organization, the NAACP National Voter Fund (NVF) in order to engage in issue advocacy, including educating voters about Federal candidates' stands on civil rights and increasing voter turnout in the African American community through non-partisan voter
registration, education, get-out-the-vote efforts, and issue advocacy. NVF has in turn created Americans For Equality (AFE) to further these efforts.2000 Campaign

During the 2000 campaign, NVF and AFE used all the tools of modern campaigns-mail, media, phone and massive grassroots organizing-directed toward the African American community. This is a historic effort--both because of the scale of the resources, and because it has been organized in such a professional and effective manner using the best of grassroots organizing and modern campaign techniques. NVF strategy during the election period has been to:

  • Target where the organization works for maximum impact in electing a pro-civil rights President, Senate and Congress.
  • Target infrequent African American voters for special attention.
  • Provide repeated contact with the identified voters.
  • Create impactful messages delivered in as personal methods as possible.


To carry out this strategy, some of the pre-election activities of NAACP NVF and AFE include:

  • Hiring over 80 staff in the field with offices in over 13 states. This included statewide and marginal congressional district work in Arkansas,
  • Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin as well as marginal congressional districts in California, Kansas, Nevada and North Carolina.
  • Registering 207,129 people (both on the ground and through our Hotline)
  • Running a Get Out The Vote (GOTV) operation with 2 literature drops and 2 canvasses of targeted districts leading up to the election to pull African American voters to the polls. (Investing over $2 million in this, alone.)
  • Recruiting more than 8,000 volunteers who went door to door with the canvass and on election day, getting out the vote. In addition, over 50,000 volunteers were involved in the effort.
  • Contacting on average 40,000 people at the door in each target city. On election day, we will be pulling over 1 million people to the polls.
  • Promoting a HOTLINE (1866-YES-VOTE) on the Tom Joyner Show and all of our material generating over 90,000 calls, of those who want to register or volunteer or had questions about the election.
  • Showing paid media for all target areas, including 4 radio spots, 2 television ads and 3 newspaper/print ads on issues including education, racial profiling and hate crimes as well as focus on our children and our future. (Paid media budget was over $2 million.) · Procuring and enhancing voter files of over 3.8 million voters primarily in 13 states. This includes 20 African American majority Congressional Districts and 20 marginal Congressional Districts.
  • Mailing up to 7 pieces of mail on hate crimes, racial profiling, education, and get out the vote (At a cost of about $2 million).· Making 7 phone calls to over 1 million households-4 that are live operator and 2 that are non-partisan GOTV recorded calls (one from Tom Joyner and one from President Bill Clinton) (At a cost of nearly $2 million).
  • Providing at least 7 million flyers and 400,000 posters
  • Providing grants totaling about $2 million to NAACP, its local Branches and Coalition partners especially in target states.
  • Three bus tours over 7 days through 10 major cities to Get Out the VoteNVF and AFE funded the above activities by sharing sources with other organizations and by receiving contributions from funders interested in promoting a civil rights agenda.


At the beginning of the election cycle, most pundits were predicting the lowest turnout of African American voters in history. The efforts of the NAACP NVF, the NAACP and others helped to increase the African American turnout by over 1 million votes in the areas in which we were organizing. The turnout in New York increased by 22% over 1996 figures; in Florida by 50% and in Missouri by 140%.

For more information about the NAACP and its work visit: http://www.naacp.org/